A clear blueprint provides clarity & drives efficiencies for UK public body
Business drivers
This national heritage organisation has an excellent in-house information management team who had already successfully created several SharePoint sites in pilot, that were thoughtfully designed and well received by their stakeholder groups. However, the number of people in the team did not match the demands of each engagement to roll out SharePoint. The team had worked hard to upskill and run activities in parallel to reduce timeframes, but even with these gains, the overall task of organisation-wide SharePoint adoption seemed insurmountable.
They were also facing several further challenges:
Complexity
The organisation was highly complex. It operated as a true matrix, with services cutting across multiple teams and business functions. And while the organisation had success at “doing more with less” this meant that many people in the organisation wore many hats and were thinly stretched. This made it very hard to understand what business processes were in place and who was responsible for what.
Migration commitment
The organisation had a large amount of content sitting on network drives and within other systems which needed to be considered for migration. The content on network drives was poorly organised and difficult to manage, and had high retention value, meaning much of it would need to be kept for long periods of time. Migration and mapping on content into new SharePoint sites effectively doubled the amount of time required for each SharePoint adoption engagement.
Piecemeal designs
Although the designs created in pilot were very well crafted, they were highly bespoke to the team that was being engaged with and not connected to a high-level view of what the overall architecture for SharePoint would look like. The level of effort put into the pilot designs would be unsustainable during a scale up and in terms of impact, this had only really been realised in a local capacity in terms of impact for the team in pilot.
Key requirements
This UK public body wanted to use SharePoint to as their new records management system – but had some real concerns regarding the substantial amount of time it was taking to develop these sites. They recognised the need for additional support to help drive the roll out of their records management plans and to find a way to rapidly scale up their development of SharePoint.
The Metataxis approach
Following a search on G-Cloud, the organisation appointed Metataxis to accelerate their adoption process and roll out SharePoint as efficiently as possible.
The Metataxis team of information architecture and records management experts initially undertook a comprehensive review the current processes in place to make clear recommendations how to increase the uptake of SharePoint in the organisation.
We proposed the development an organisation-wide Information Architecture Framework to support the successful adoption of SharePoint. We were then invited to develop this framework, which was supported by a Proof of Concept SharePoint site to demonstrate to the organisation how this form of adoption would work.
The Proof of Concept proved that our Information Architecture Framework would deliver a consistent SharePoint design which was achievable with the resources available. The Information Architecture Framework helped “unblock” adoption challenges noted above in the following ways:
Standardisation
Clearly some form of standardisation of information architecture was going to help the information governance team reduce the amount of intellectual effort for each SharePoint site created and speed up roll out. After consultation with stakeholders across the business, Metataxis took the time to understand critical business processes as well as how information is organised stored and found. This was used to inform the development of modular information architecture structures which could be selected and used as needed within site structures. In addition, we were also careful to select a stakeholder group who would have maximum impact – meaning that we chose to work with a part of the organisation which would address the majority of design needs and create structures for a large number of teams in the organisation.
Contextual design
We’ve all done it. We’ve all designed something that fits a peculiar situation only to find that it doesn’t translate to the wider business. It might be a Choice column you later realise should be Managed Metadata or a Content Type which you designed for a specific purpose but has a generic name like “Report”. These things are annoying, take time to unpick and can lead to inconsistencies in the design. Developing a framework and considering local solutions in this context reduces the design cul de sacs and produces a stronger overall design. Understanding the broader context allowed the client to know what elements of the Information Architecture would work where, meaning that more standardised approaches could be used to answer the majority of design requirements.
Scoping and planning
During pilot, while SharePoint was addressed in a piecemeal manner, it always felt as if the organisation was nibbling at the edges of a SharePoint implementation. There was no clear direction or way to measure progress. With the new Information Architecture Framework, the path forward became much clearer. The Framework made SharePoint adoption across the organisation quantifiable, meaning that the client could make tangible plans and allocate resource accordingly. And perhaps most reassuring for the client, there was a definable period of time within which SharePoint adoption would take place – with a clear an end date.
Rationalisation of migration
Metataxis also recommended that the client re-examine their requirement to migrate all their content into newly created SharePoint sites and suggested an interim architecture for content which needed to be moved off network drives rapidly. The organisation was encouraged to think about prioritising work and storing the remainder in a simple architecture – even if only to give them breathing space to concentrate on one thing at a time.
Business benefits
Adopting and applying Information Architecture approaches to SharePoint has provided much clarity and successfully reduced effort for this UK public body, where the team are now well prepared to confidently deploy SharePoint as its records management solution.
This new information architecture framework provides a clear blueprint and moving forward, will ensure consistency across all future sites. Having a framework in place also provides opportunities to reuse existing information architecture designs which will in turn reduce duplication of effort and help to make the task of scaling up much easier.
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